On the Traditional Family and Postmodern “Left-Talk” (Column 96)

With God’s help

A few days ago (who even remembers anymore?) there was a minor uproar over remarks by MK Mirav Michaeli at a panel held in Australia regarding "the new families." The remarks elicited predictable reactions from the religious side, and she herself connected it, how could she not?!, to the Right and the Left. The nonsense and drivel she voiced there do not really warrant a response, and I would not have bothered with them, were it not that her mode of discourse reflects a highly fashionable principled conception of the postmodern world, and that is worth addressing.

I must say that the connection she made to Right and Left is not without foundation, although in this specific case even distinctly left-wing figures, and even people from New Family and other natural candidates to support her remarks, came out against her. Apparently there is a limit to the nonsense all of us are prepared to hear. But precisely because I think she is a clever and intelligent woman, these bizarre and foolish remarks take on principled significance. It turns out that the postmodern framework (I am careful not to call it an intellectual framework) causes intelligent people to chatter nonsense enough to make one’s hair stand on end. Incidentally, this really does happen mainly on the Left. That phenomenon says something about the postmodern framework, and this is an opportunity to touch on it a bit.

A few gems and comments on her holy utterances

Let me begin with an initial response to a few of the gems that issued from the holy mouth of Mirav Michaeli, may she live long, at that gathering. The main gem: "The nuclear family, as we know it, is the least safe place for children." Can you make sense of that? In fact, it would be better to prevent couples who want to establish a traditional family (what does that have to do with a nuclear one?…) from doing so, and to persuade them to form relationships with same-sex partners instead (preferably, of course, without religious marriage, heaven forbid). That will be better for the children. If until now we had heard that the traditional family is not the only possible one, and that children do not necessarily suffer in a new family (incidentally, the High Court of Justice adopted the opposite view as the state’s position and ruled accordingly), it now turns out that the traditional family is actually a social disease. It should be prohibited, or at least require licensing and supervision for anyone who wants to run such an anachronistic institution. There is grave concern that children there will not receive all the good they receive in the new family. It is important to note the following sharpening: "In the Western world, and in traditional societies this is even more true." That is, it is true in all societies (so do not think this is specifically about Jewish religious marriage), but especially in traditional societies.

The next gem is: "The data show that every fifth child experiences some kind of abuse – sexual, physical, emotional." Everything is based, of course, on solid scientific data. "Science," as usual, operates in favor of modernity and against tradition. Michaeli also claimed that the traditional family structure gives preference to men: "This is the place where parental rights and absolute custody still give men absolute control over their children, and all too often also over women – it is part of the ongoing pain among children." One’s heart truly aches for those miserable children who were not privileged to have two same-sex parents (preferably lesbians. In a male homosexual couple the suffering is presumably redoubled. Living with two controlling male parents must be truly dreadful. Well, perhaps the fact that it is not, God forbid, a traditional family neutralizes the problem…). I wonder about the data (dubious, as later became clear) claiming that every fifth child experiences abuse. Even if we accept this vague declaration and these profound "studies," are there also data about the effect of family type on those figures, and the direction of the effect? Did anyone examine how many children there are in other kinds of families, and what additional parameters affect this figure?

During the panel Michaeli proposed state supervision and authorization as part of changing the traditional institution of marriage: "The state should offer two default agreements: one is custody of the children. A child can have more than two parents; they do not necessarily have to be his or her biological parents." According to her, the state should also determine that a person who is to become a child’s parent must meet criteria supervised by the state, and within that framework she noted that "this should include a great deal of freedom for the child, to be who he or she is." Wonderful. Let us say that by chance there is an unusual and exceptional child who does not want to study, or alternatively wants to fire a gun at passersby. Michaeli apparently argues that his π (=3.141…) mothers should allow him that as part of his healthy upbringing.

Her proposal basically means that state approval will be required for parenthood. One need not be especially perceptive to understand the real connection between our issue and questions of Left and Right. Michaeli’s bizarre leftism advocates centralization and state supervision over everything that happens in your home. Big Brother will give approval for all our actions. This "liberal" proposes that the state, which of course functions splendidly and without abuses or problems, should supervise all our defective parenting, abusive creatures that we are. I am already waiting for the demand that the state grant permission and certification to each of us to breathe air and drink water, since studies show that about one-fifth of water-drinking, air-breathing parents abuse their children. What, you did not know that water-drinking parents are the least safe structure for children?! Have you not read the studies?! In fact, this is an a priori armchair study, because those who do not drink or breathe die, and then the children will certainly not suffer abuse from their parents. Moreover, their happy children will be turned over to state-run orphanages or to lesbian couples, or alternatively to pairs of heterosexual women whom the state will force to live as a female couple for the sake of the child’s freedom, and thus the children will enjoy marvelous treatment and a glorious childhood. I must confess that I do not know who Mirav Michaeli’s parents were (though I do know who her grandfather was), but judging by the product they produced I strongly suspect they were not lesbians. You see?! We told you so!

In her explanatory and defensive remarks you can find that her words were taken out of context, and that in fact she was only speaking against the monopoly of the religious and of tradition over the institution of the family. She really meant to argue that other forms of parenthood are also legitimate and not necessarily inferior. Why does that sound to me like something banal that has long been behind us, and really of no interest to any viewer, Australian or Israeli? Why does it sound to me like something nobody would regard as even the slightest novelty (certainly when it is said on an open panel in Australia, and not in a formal yeshiva lecture at Ponevezh or Har Hamor)? Why is it completely clear to me that this is not what she said, even before I heard her remarks?

Mirav Michaeli apparently belongs to a very weak and persecuted group, since not only the evil right-wingers and religious people (and extremists), but even her ideological allies came out against her remarks and even called them by not very flattering names. It is worth seeing the exchange between Yehuda Glick and Irit Rosenblum, chair of New Family (included as an insert in the article on her response). Look there at what the person who heads the organization that supports new families says about Michaeli’s remarks (and for some reason I am willing to bet that she does not belong to the extreme right and/or the religious camp, and is not among Bezalel Smotrich’s supporters). She supports the existence of new families (how nice of her to support facts. I, for example, support the proposition that 2+3=5), but all the rest, in her words, is babble and nonsense. She too probably took the remarks out of context, this wicked right-wing religious woman. She did not understand that all Mirav Michaeli said was that same-sex couples should also be allowed to raise children. A novelty no Australian and/or Israeli ear has ever heard before.

Back to postmodernism

Well, until now I have poured my bitterness out on you, and now the time has come for a bit more seriousness. How does an intelligent woman come to utter such nonsense? In her explanatory remarks you can find, in a much clearer way, the basis for this babble.

Let us now ignore her unfortunate statement that the ordinary family is the most dangerous place for children. Let us judge her favorably and assume she got carried away and said it in the heat of the moment. Let us also ignore her proposal that the state should manage and authorize all of our parenting. That is a typical infantile left-wing outburst that sees the state as everyone’s mother (I mean the old Left, the one that advocates centralism and state control, not the new liberal postmodern Left that rejects this entirely). But Michaeli also explained to us that traditional marriage gives the husband power and control over the wife and the children. Therefore it is so dangerous—how had we not thought of that?! She explained that in fact this is why the old family was founded in the first place. Otherwise how would men have taken control of their women and children?!

To understand this logical juggling trick, it is important to know another characteristic of postmodern chatter (yes indeed, the kind that "opens exciting possibilities in the service of God," according to Rabbi Shagar). In a postmodern world there is no truth and no values. There is no right and no wrong, no beautiful and ugly, no wise and foolish, and in fact there is nothing at all. The obvious question, then, is why people act at all. Why do they promote conceptions and values? Certainly not because they believe in them, since such a thing does not exist. The answer is simple: they do it in order to accumulate power and seize resources and positions. In the postmodern eye, every phenomenon occurs because of schemes and the pursuit of power. Why? Because there is nothing else that can motivate us to act. From here you will understand that promoting the traditional family does not stem from values (with which one may of course agree or disagree), but from schemes of power. And there you have the conclusion: it is nothing but a means for the coercive control of men. Mirav Michaeli does not even consider the possibility that there are people who support a traditional family because in their eyes it is a value, that is, because they believe it is right. It is obvious to her that this is a scheme whose sole aim is to acquire positions of power and control, nothing more.

But our Mirav did not only claim that the traditional family is a scheme. That is a standard postmodern claim, and one does not invite you to Australia for that. As an enlightened and modern scientist, she even brought proof for her words: from the fact that traditional marriage gives power to the husband (assuming that is true at all, and I dispute it) she infers that this marriage was created originally, from the outset, in order to give him that power. This is a typical pattern of postmodern argumentation, one that obviously suffers from a correlation fallacy. Our teachers long ago taught us that correlation is not necessarily an expression of causation. The fact that a given structure gives power to someone does not necessarily mean that the structure was originally created in order to create that power. This logical leap—which in the postmodern world is usually perceived as a self-evident tautology—is nonsense, rooted in the same assumption mentioned above (that processes unfold only on the basis of dark schemes, and not out of belief in any values). This absurd assumption distorts people’s logic and leads them to perceive the world as if it were nothing but a shell for malicious demons running wild and abusing us all.

In their eyes there are no weak populations, only weakened ones (see every journalistic interview with protesters from disability groups. They are never weak but weakened. By whom? Who weakened them? It is unclear. Perhaps the Holy One, blessed be He). There are no populations or groups that are better or worse, for there are no standards by which to determine who is better or worse. What there is, is only populations with more or less power. The world is nothing but a war of interests. There are no beliefs and no values, only schemes and power. The one thing I can say in these people’s favor is that they are not judgmental. But that is not because of generosity and inclusiveness, God forbid; on the contrary, it is because there are no standards of judgment, since everyone is equally wicked and power-driven. If you ask a postmodernist to explain his own actions, and what schemes he himself is advancing in his deeds and words, you will hear one of two things: either an ignoring of the scheming that characterizes all human beings (because postmodernity is a company of ministering angels exempt from this social disease), or a proud admission that he too acts only out of agenda and the advancement of interests, because there can be no other basis for his actions. Therefore you should not take him seriously, because he is not making arguments at all; he is merely hatching plots.

These people simply project their own schemes onto the world around them; in other words, they attribute to others their own defects. They are people without values, who act only for self-interested reasons, and therefore they interpret everyone around them in the same way. Through their scheming spectacles they see only schemes. Those spectacles are not sensitive to a different, non-scheming kind of activity. Incidentally, the new critique of science proceeds in quite a similar way. Pseudo-disciplines such as gender studies and the like are, after all, conducted without any standard. A heap of nonsense without meaning or value, whose entire point is the promotion of agendas. And what is the content of those articles? A heap of claims that all scientific articles are without value or meaning, and were designed only to promote agendas. They accuse others of their own defects, as we have already said.

To explain to us the absolute justice of their claim that there is no absolute justice, they recruit distorted logics based on groundless assumptions. Usually "data" will be presented; it goes without saying that these are "scientific" and research-based "data," of course (in these pseudo-disciplines, if you administer a questionnaire to twenty people willing to answer it for a token payment—you have done research). Almost all of it is worthless and produces exactly what one expects from it. Add to the "data" and "studies" a pinch of faulty logic, and you immediately arrive at the desired "scientific" conclusions. Thus Michaeli’s "data" teach us that one out of every five children in a traditional family experiences abuse (where have all those children and other participants from the "studies" disappeared to? Why do I never see any of them around me?). She also found in those same studies that all of this happens solely because of the traditional character of the family unit, of course (what else—because they drink water?!).

If many children experience abuse, the conclusion is clear: the traditional family is the least safe place for children. The state should supervise it, and preferably even prohibit it by law.

A brief look at "left-talk"

Within my remarks I have already noted another interesting point that emerges from Michaeli’s words. In a postmodern conception, the last thing I would expect is a demand that the state manage and supervise parenting, or a demand for uniform standards (whose purpose is of course broad freedom for children, but for some reason through blatant restriction of parents). Those are demands of the old Left, the one that does not believe in the individual but believes in centralism, in a state that supervises and manages everything and does not allow people to conduct themselves as they wish. At the same time, the framework in which these arguments are presented is distinctly postmodern, even though postmodernism is the new Left, and is actually the exact opposite of the old one.

This is very typical of our cousins on the bewildered Left. Old-left arguments appear among them together with new-left arguments, despite the contradiction. On the one hand, there is no truth, everything is schemes, and we are all wicked. Conclusion: Plato’s pure state, run by a committee of philosophers headed by Mirav Michaeli, must manage everything. And what about the state’s schemes? Does it not have schemes? Does it operate according to values? Is it impossible to imagine a state scheme that decides that only a traditional family may raise children? What will Mirav Michaeli propose to us then? Who will supervise the supervisor?

By the way, have you ever heard of such a state? I mean a state that does not let new families raise children. Ah, you have heard of one too? There is such a state right here in the Middle East, not far from us (it is run by Deri, Gafni, and the Chief Rabbinate). So it is precisely to that state that Mirav wants to hand supervisory power over all of us. Our traditional and outdated state will manage Mirav Michaeli’s liberal agenda for the sake of freedom and the new families. Do you get that, Baruch?!

I am already waiting for the moment when Mirav Michaeli takes to the streets to demonstrate on behalf of the biometric database. After all, if the state is to manage our lives, it needs a comprehensive information repository. Oops, see here and here that our Mirav is not really willing to be so generous to the state and give it control over the data and over us at all. Well, consistency is really not a reasonable or acceptable demand among our postmodern cousins. Consistency is a disease, a kind of extreme right-wing anachronism. Careful, it is not contagious…